T.V. on TV: Friday Night Lights, The Nine, & Battlestar Galactica

Friday Night Lights (tonight 8 p.m., NBC) is the most accurate and honest portrayal of contemporary small town life in the small screen’s history. Relocated from the 1980s to the present, the pilot cribs heavily from the 2004 movie (which, like the series, was written and directed by Peter Berg), yet it manages to stand apart from it. If you’ve seen any sports movie ever, you won’t be surprised by much that happens; Friday Night Lights marches through the expected cliches in its portrayal of the “big game,” and even repeats a heartrending moment from the movie (though it happens to a different character). Still, for anyone who has attended a high school football game, much of the series will ring true, and the emotions that Berg earns through sports movie cliche are genuine. And the overall emphasis is different. Unlike the film, where nearly every event was directed toward the climactic showdown, in the series pilot the game is almost an afterthought; bits of it even feel rushed and perfunctory. This time around, Berg is more interested in the town itself.

The fictional Dillon, Texas, is small and economically depressed. Town gatherings occur at a local restaurant and a Chevy dealership. Most of its characters live in small houses or trailers; only the quarterback’s cheerleader girlfriend, Lyla Garrity (the unknown and perfect Minka Kelly) and the football coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler, seeming almost exhausted in his intensity and erasing any memory of Early Edition), live in affluent neighborhoods. We hear references to racism from local sports reporters covering the Panthers, and when the team appears in public, everyone has advice on how to play Friday night.

In this place, there are just two things worth living for, football and God (the two are conflated rather clumsily when a small child asks if God loves football and is assured that everyone does). The local radio station seems devoted to round-the-clock discussion of the high school team, the Panthers, first-year coach Taylor and Peyton Manning-esque quarterback, Jason Street (Scott Porter). All conversations inevitably lead to the game; even a stolen moment between Street and Lyla is framed in the context of football. NBC’s other big pilot, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, has earned criticism for its often condescending portrayal of Christians; television so rarely gets religion right that it’s easy to fear that Berg’s series will get it wrong, too. But it doesn’t. The characters recite the Lord’s Prayer before practice, and at pilot’s end, when confronted by a problem bigger than any of them, they turn to prayer again. Berg doesn’t turn this into an opportunity to either mock or praise his characters—they’re still, after all, high school kids who get drunk and have premarital sex and otherwise behave in ways that would make Pat Robertson cluck his tongue. But the show’s understanding of the social function of prayer does offer viewers a window into a world where there’s always something larger than the individual, be it a deity or a community.

The series doesn’t alway step right. Some of the dialogue is cringe-worthy (“This is life, not Maxim magazine!”), and the images of big tackles scored to hard rock is a football film cliche that’s wearing thin. Plus, there are touches that don’t work as well as Berg seems to think—as when the coach’s daughter Julie (Aimee Teegarden) declares to her parents, “Moby Dick is the perfect metaphor for this town” (though that scene ends on a nicely observed father-daughter moment). Finally, Julie’s character is underdeveloped, and for a grimly realistic series, her dialogue is too tart, as if she’d stepped out of Veronica Mars. But these miscalculations fade when the dialogue drops out and the camera glides by the darkened, grey buildings of the town and the barren practice field with its leafless trees and brown grass under grey clouds, backed by a gorgeously moody score by Explosions in the Sky. Too often, it’s easy to say, “Well, that was good, for network TV.” Friday Night Lights is a rare network series that’s just good, period.

~

Like Friday Night Lights, The Nine (Wednesday, 10 p.m., ABC) fascinates for reasons you don’t expect. The serialized elements (namely, the mystery of what happened during the bank robbery that opens the pilot) are compelling enough, but what sets this series apart is how it uses that mystery as a pretext to dig into the ways that people’s lives are altered by trauma. It’s Lost: The PTSD Edition.

Here, as in Friday Night Lights, there are misjudged or overdone moments (someone drops a tray full of dishes and the survivors flinch). But for the most part, The Nine is a closely observed character study, contrasting the people who went in to the bank with the people who came out shaken, numb. Existing relationships apparently dissolved within the bank, while new ones were forged between people who were strangers mere hours before. The nerd becomes a hero; the cop fears he’ll be a scapegoat; the surgeon finds himself incapable. Without putting too fine a point on it, the bank robbery works as a metaphor not just for 9/11, but for any seriously life-changing event.

It helps that the show is well-cast with a mix of familiar faces (Tim Daly’s cop, who seems most upset by a botched rescue attempt; Scott Wolf"s hyper-confident and confused-in-love surgeon, relying on his dimples as much as any Wolf character does; Chi McBride’s bank manager, the most obviously shattered by the robbery; and Kim Raver’s assistant district attorney, who seems most interested in keeping relationships born in the bank alive) and acto’s who’ve been knocking around in guest roles for a while (Camille Guaty as a bank employee) and some new faces (Dana Davis as the manager’s wannabe-rebel daughter; Jessica Collins as the surgeon’s overly compassionate girlfriend). These actors are able to put over a few clunky lines, and when it comes time for them to reveal how their experience shattered them, they rise to the challenge (notably a gathering near the end when they have the chemistry of fast friends). In a season filled with great new ensembles, this is the best.

The biggest concern, of course, is that this is a series that will have trouble sustaining interest beyond its first season (it seems self-evident that the mystery element will have to end after year one). As serialized dramas continue to catch on, American television will eventually have to figure out how to do limited-run series that are longer than miniseries but have definite endpoints; but for now, give The Nine the benefit of the doubt.

~

Battlestar Galactica returns this Friday at 9 p.m. on Sci Fi Channel with a two-hour premiere. Coupled with the British import Doctor Who, the two make up the best night of science fiction on the air right now (not that there are a lot of contenders).

It’s not easy to convince newcomers to watch Galactica. Call it the Buffy syndrome. Like the latter series, Galactica is critically acclaimed, and smarter about many things than other dramas. In particular, it understands the numbing effect of wartime—the way it turns soldiers into raw, workaday grunts who just want to go home. It’s also smart about finding the intersection between the civilian government and the war machine it ostensibly controls, and pointing out how that same machine can rise up and subsume civilian authority at any moment. Most of the first season was spent with the characters barely avoiding a coup that eventually hit early in season two. It’s grim stuff played absolutely straight, shot in a jittery docudrama style that almost never pulls back for a wide shot to let you get your bearings. In many series, that would feel like a cheat, but in Galactica, it’s appropriately disorienting (the series, after all, kicked off with most of the human race being decimated by monotheistic robots). Unfortunately, like Buffy, Galactica is a genre series with off-putting name that’s based on an inferior predecessor—in this case, the short-lived Star Wars ripoff from the last ’70s. Luckily, Ron Moore and David Eick, the creative shepherds of Galactica, have taken the best element from the original (the idea of human survivors of an apocalypse searching for a new home) and wedded it to a series that’s equal parts political and military drama; think The West Wing crossed with Platoon and set in space.

Science fiction and fantasy have long been pop culture’s bastard children; even the western had a sort of mythic poetry that was easily embraced by the intelligentsia. Chalk it up to the commercial constraints of the TV and movie industries, which punish complexity and reward schlock, but while science fiction literature is given enough latitude accomodate the likes of Phillip K. Dick, Samuel Delaney and Ursula K. LeGuin, TV and cinema are often limited to space opera. The exceptions (2001, Blade Runner and the like) don’t disprove the rule; the long-term popular success of Star Wars and Star Trek so dominate the genre that every new effort is likely to be judged in relation to them.

The most popular thing to say to get people to watch Galactica is to say that, yes, it’s science fiction, but it’s really about real-world problems like terrorism and abortion. While that’s true (the series is more honest about the moral implications of the War on Terror than anything else on the air, or even at the multiplex), the show also does for science fiction itself what The Wire does for cop shows and what Deadwood did for the western—it cleans off decades of neglect and build-up and uncovers what made the genre relevant in the first place. In many ways, the series is a very specific response to Star Trek, that show couched in 60s idealism and set in a universe that’s nearly unrecognizable. (Battlestar wasn’t the first series to answer Star Trek—Farscape and Firefly also took on the behemoth with varying degrees of success.) But if the original Trek offered examples of who we might hope to become, Battlestar Galactica shows what we probably will become. Robots that look like people and faster-than-light drives that can carry one across solar systems in minutes won’t change the basic human makeup, which is too often dominated by pettiness, greed and sheer will to survive. One of the show’s greatest reconceptions of the original material is in the character of Gaius Baltar, a sniveling bastard in the original who was reborn as a man too frightened and weighed down by his complicity in the original attack (he bedded the most beautiful of the robots, giving her the ability to weaken humanity’s defenses). Played by a haggard and harried James Callis, he’s a believably small bureaucrat, petty enough to exploit the president’s weaknesses (namely, a desire to continue the war rather than settle on a barely inhabitable planet) to win an election merely to satisfy his own craving for more power. And he puts his will to survive ahead of anything else, often collaborating directly with the enemy. Baltar exemplifies the show’s fear that humanity can’t change its stripes.

The show is packed with great performances. Edward James Olmos (as Admiral Adama, a military man constantly questioning the worth of his species) and Mary McDonnell (as President Roslin, the woman Hillary Clinton dreams of being) are the names you recognize, and both turn in performances rich enough to rank with the their career-best work. But the lesser-known players are equally good, especially Katee Sackhoff as the brave, almost reckless pilot Starbuck; the decision to reimagine a male character from the original series as a woman caused a fan uproar before the introductory miniseries had even aired, but Sackhoff’s turn is more observant of the way a soldier, even a female one, has to shut off real human contact in order to function. The show’s refreshing lack of technobabble grounds the show’s human moments in an emotional reality that will be recognizable to anyone. These characters aren’t the swashbuckling stereotypes of 1950s pulp magazines; they’re sons trying to impress fathers, soldiers trying to function despite their grief over recent losses, and presidents making hard decisions in the heat of battle.

Galactica’s great flaw is its inconsistency: in the first two seasons, stellar episodes bumped up against ones that seemed ill-conceived. (Season Two saw the remarkable “Epiphanies,” an episode that featured one of McDonnell’s best performances and substantial advancements in the show’s mythology, placed right next to “Black Market,” the series’s worst episode yet, with dramatically inert flashbacks and a story that required us to care about characters we barely knew.) Now that Moore and Eick have had a few seasons to settle into the series’s production rhythms, one hopes they’ll finally put together 20 straight episodes of thought-provoking television. In any event, this is a series that rewards loyal (and close) viewing. If you’re a newcomer, check out one of the numerous episode guides available online (tv.com offers up fairly succinct recaps) or watch “The Story So Far,” the special that seems to air at every hour of the day on any NBC-Universal owned station (or, better yet, watch it online at tv.com’s BSG page), then tune in Friday night and give it a chance.

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I quite liked Friday Night Lights. And while I agree that the line, "This isn't Maxim's", is a clumsy one, still, I'm much more tolerant of the line reassuring the young boy that "Everyone loves football". It just seems like a sentiment that can easily and readily be identified in a small town where football plays such a prominent role. In any case, I hope that the show survives. The shaky camera movement doesn't bother me (hey, I'm a long-time fan of Homicide: Life on the Streets which employed a similar camera style). I just hope that viewers give this show a chance.Posted by La Binsk on 2006-10-06 19:08:00

Well, I just watched the Friday Night Lights pilot on nbc.com. They've got the entire episode over there, albeit not the greatest quality video and cut up with five Nissan ads, but I haven't yet come across a network directly putting out an entire episode for free (sort of) online. I've seen them on iTunes, but not direct from the network.

Todd, I felt your assessment was pretty spot on. You called the moments where they fumbled the authenticity (sorry, hard to resist), but I agree that you don't have to qualify this one with "good for network TV". That's nice.

Hey, can I ask you guys who know about these things--is the handheld shaky camera ever going to become passe? I don't uniformly dislike it (I don't mind it on The Office where they the camera is virtually another character), but more often than not I continue to find it a distraction. Like tonight, I wanted to yell, it's OK; it's good enough; you don't need to hit us over the head with the "realness" cues; it might be nice with a moment here and there of smoother steadiness. I did not mind it when they were showing the town. I actually thought it was effective there. And maybe you need a consistent look, but I really could have done without it in the dialogue scenes which were chopped up enough as it was.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just a dinosaur (at age 39). I can still remember my . . . horror almost at the very first NYPD Blue. But they were super spastic early on as I remember. It became and remains one of my favorite TV shows, so I guess I got over it.

Well, maybe one of you folks can enlighten me.

This got way more rambly than a House Next Door comment is supposed to be! Forgive me:

I liked Friday Night Lights. It's exciting to see so much good TV going on. And it is exciting to be able to come here and read good writing about it.

(NOTE: the above comment was made by NSpector, but the original was inadvertently lost)Posted by Anonymous on 2006-10-05 12:18:00

A brief plea to everyone to watch Friday Night Lights next week and The Nine tonight. FNL's ratings were NOT good. While I don't expect the same for The Nine (it does, after all, follow Lost), FNL stands to be the next bemoaned, canceled show if the numbers don't perk up (somewhat similar to Freaks and Geeks--from the other side of the high school show coin of course).

And, naturally, this all ties in to what Matt says above.Posted by Todd VanDerWerff on 2006-10-04 17:49:00

Ross: "And its strikes me as odd (or perhaps just sad) that a STAR TREK series must be played in syndication or on UPN rather than on CBS in order to justify producing it."

Yes, at first that seemed odd to me, too, considering the network-sized budget spent on Sci-Fi Channel productions of all sorts (not counting Dr. Who, an import). However, the business model makes sense for Sci-Fi because the channel appeals to a devoted niche audience that will give pretty much any program a chance if it falls within genre parameters--and if they like it, they'll not only become loyal viewers, they'll watch reruns, encourage other people to try the show, and seek out related material (books, DVDs, online content) that also sends money back to the parent company. And the TV advertisers tend to be more focused and committed as well, because they know what audience they're buying access to--and they're not as fickle as network advertisers, who tend to cut and run at the first sign that a show isn't a ratings blockbuster.

BSG is maybe the ultimate proof that Sci-Fi Channel's business model can work like gangbusters. It's not a particularly glamorous or even inviting series; it's certainly not escapism; in fact it's as off-putting in may ways as Deadwood and The Wire. It's a thoughtful, serious, provocative series aimed at grownups--in other words, real sci-fi, as opposed to sci-fi flavored escapism--and it's detailed enough to reward repeat viewings. That makes it unattractive from the standpoint of a network programmer. But it also means the series has not merely an audience, but a constituency, and could conceivably keep generating audience interest, and money, on DVD and in repeats (not just on Sci-Fi, but elsewhere) indefinitely, as various incarnations of Star Trek have done.

Back to your original question, syndication is a different animal than niche cable. For a genre series, it's a less volatile and creatively hostile environment than a broadcast network, but not nearly as welcoming as basic cable (or best of all, pay cable). I understand why Star Trek returned to television in the late 80s in syndication and stayed there through additional incarnations, rather than trying to go through a broadcast network; the original only became a pop culture phenomenon after it had been cancelled by NBC and shunted off to reruns on local stations, so Roddenberry and company were smart to stick with a business plan that had, accidentally and in retrospect, worked like a charm. (The franchise wore out its welcome and developed serious quality control problems near the end, but that's a whole other thread.)

This discussion all flows back to the idea that the network TV business has always been, and still is, about short-term thinking, while the cable business is about long-term thinking. The future belongs to long-term thinkers. The broadcast networks show signs of understanding that with series like Lost, Prison Break and 24--none of which are as challenging and consistently good or smart as the best cable series, it should be noted--but it's been a slow re-education process, seriously hampered by the need to win every timeslot, keep the parent company's stock price up, support a corporate bureaucracy that was created in the 20th century yet persisted into the 21st, and inflate quarterly shareholder's statements to the max.Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2006-10-04 16:46:00

Todd wrote:

I think the stigma is against science fiction that isn't set in some form of "our" reality.

Totally agree - although I'm perplexed as to why that stigma exists. Especially in a time when the masses flock to the movies to see the STAR WARS, MATRIX & LOTR flicks - three very popular franchises that are clearly not grounded in our reality.

I brought up in my DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE piece that DOCTOR WHO plays to prime time BBC1 audiences to great ratings and acclaim: It won the BAFTA for Best Drama series; BSG would never even be nominated for a Best Drama Emmy, although it clearly should be! Admittedly, the new DW has had to make a few concessions in order to snag audiences, such as spending far more time on Earth than it has since the early '70s Pertwee era; casting "hot" Doctors instead of older men - apparently Bill Nighy was a close contender - I can't help but think his age was a factor, as it certainly had nothing to do with his acting abilities.

When I watch BSG I think about how many people are missing out on one of TV's very best dramas just because it isn't marketed toward the masses, or because it has spaceships and robots. I'd think BSG would be a no-brainer of a series for I dunno, maybe fans of 24?

And its strikes me as odd (or perhaps just sad) that a STAR TREK series must be played in syndication or on UPN rather than on CBS in order to justify producing it.Posted by Ross Ruediger on 2006-10-04 02:32:00

Cheesesteak, if you have iTunes, BSG is available there as well.Posted by Todd VanDerWerff on 2006-10-03 22:12:00

I don't think the stigma is against science fiction television itself (after all, The Twilight Zone, The X-Files and Lost were all fairly sizable hits--though, admittedly TZ took until syndication to really catch on). I think the stigma is against science fiction that isn't set in some form of "our" reality. BSG is set in space, and that will always be a deal-breaker for some, which is fine (though, ironically, BSG makes a real attempt to set itself in "our" space, conforming to real physics and such as much as possible).

I think that the lack of respect for genre fiction and comic books (even as the two get progressively more daring over the years) is very similar to the lack of respect for television in many circles--all have been so bad in absolutely rancid ways. To make matters worse, the crap-to-good ratio is probably higher in all three media as well (it's easy for TV-heads like myself to forget this, especially in an era when DVDs and DVRs make it easy to pick only the good stuff to watch, but there is a LOT of crappy TV out there, used to fill the endless space on all of those networks).Posted by Todd VanDerWerff on 2006-10-03 21:43:00

Todd wrote:

But if the original Trek offered examples of who we might hope to become, Battlestar Galactica shows what we probably will become.

I like that a lot...a ~whole~ lot.

Something hit me a while back, that I'll just throw it out there and see what people think:

We live in a time where sci-fi and fantasy are more acceptable than they've probably ever been. At the movies, this type of fare is almost guaranteed to rake in the dollars - and it's certainly not just the hardcore fans who are laying down their cash for these flicks, be they spaceships, superheroes or Saruman.

Why then does it seem to remain niche entertainment when it comes to series television? Is it somehow "OK" to go to the movies and immerse yourself in such fare for two hours, while a weekly devotion conjures up images of the 40-year virgin? Is it socially acceptable to love this stuff in increments, so long as it doesn't become "obsession"? How is it any more obsessive to tune in for free to a sci-fi series than it is to tune in to DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES every week? How is it any less obsessive to devotedly follow a film franchise every two or three summers? Why are the "biggest" sci-fi series relegated to a niche network like Sci Fi? Why isn't BSG on the prime time NBC schedule (a rumor that was actually floating around this summer)?

(Too many questions, I know. Feel free to answer any or none.)Posted by Ross Ruediger on 2006-10-03 21:27:00

I've just gotten into Battlestar Galactica and it's nice to read this balanced review. Now I'm just frustrated because I don't have cable so I won't be able to catch the new season on SciFi.Posted by Cheesesteak on 2006-10-03 20:31:00

I'll agree that it feels rushed--particularly in the last act sequences at the big game, which may feel a bit too perfunctory (especially to those who tune in for the football). But I think the show's head and heart are in the right place, and I'm ready to be an enthusiastic cheerleader for it.Posted by Todd VanDerWerff on 2006-10-03 19:31:00

Todd: I worred that you might be overstating the case in your opening sentence, but then I watched the pilot of Friday Night Lights and I think you might be right. This isn't a small town show based on nostalgic personal memories (or worse, nostalgic memories of watching other small town shows). It's got a journalistic density. My only problem was that it felt too rushed--if it were on cable, it could spread out over a whole hour without ads, and give the characters and situations time to breathe. But you're right that it doesn't condescend or oversimplify; the bustling, slightly hyper quality seems right, since so many of the characters are squirming under adult expectations and the burden of their own fantasies of wealth and escape.

Another thing I liked: the omnipresent local sports media, which turns every public appearance by team members--even a meal in a restaurant--into some kind of perverse ESPN blabber reel. It's like these kids are being conditioned to be false at a time when they most need to be true to themselves.Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2006-10-03 17:13:00